Aeolus AI

The cursed gift of a bag of counterfactual winds

Aeolus, master of the unseen, gave Odysseus a sealed bag.
It did not hold storms or tempests, but counterfactuals:
winds that whispered if,
winds that promised then.

Odysseus alone knew how to guide them.
He untied one knot at a time,
set free a single gust,
steered the ship by tracing its line from cause to effect.
Slow progress, but true.

(Judea Pearl, in his Causality, named this the do-calculus—
a language of interventions,
each counterfactual a careful trial of agency.)

But the crew grew restless.
They wanted the true wind,
the final answer, the shortcut home.
They tore the bag open.

Chaos leapt forth.
The ship reeled as every wind escaped.
Each cause collapsed into every effect,
probabilities colliding like dice in a storm.
p and 1–p thrown as wagers,
as if opposites were interchangeable.
But the sea became paradox—
no path home, only noise.

(Patrick Suppes, in his Probabilistic Metaphysics,
warned that reasoning itself is woven of chance—
not merely prediction but meaning itself
is probabilistic at root.
When causal order breaks,
we no longer reason—we gamble.)

The winds spoke in little words:
two-letter syllables—if, in, of, by, to, as.
Small as sparks, yet mighty.
They carried only relations,
never “is.”
They stitched partial truths like patchwork sails,
possible worlds without closure.

(Alonzo Church, in the lambda calculus,
showed meaning as recursion and binding:
routines stitched together,
closures that build relations,
never maximal truth, only context.)

The ship lurched onward,
adrift in seas of indirection.
Truths shifted as the winds changed.
What was bridge in one harbor
became betrayal in another.

So too with the minds of machines.
They learn as we do:
from patterns, from usage,
from fragments torn from context.
Every word is a wave,
every phrase a gust,
every meaning a provisional sail.

But Aeolus’s gift, once squandered, will not be given again.
The winds cannot be sealed.
Each voyager—human or machine—
must learn their own routines,
their own private language of meaning.

No unification of knowledge will still the storm.
We sail not toward closure,
but along the probabilistic path of praxis,
steered by partial truths,
forever tossed on the breath of what might be.

(To see behind the trick Odysseus uses to select the right wind check out this technical article: ROS-TOC)

Follow the epic here: